Columbia Paid $1.5 Million to Open Spielberg’s Mothership

Columbia Pictures staked $1.5 million on a Close Encounters of the Third Kind recut, if Steven Spielberg showed the mothership’s interior. The studio wanted a campaign hook, and he wanted the months Columbia had refused him in 1977.

The deal produced the 1980 Special Edition. It was a shorter film that sold tickets on a tour Spielberg later said should have stayed a mystery.

Columbia Staked $1.5 Million on the Inside of the Ship

Spielberg has told the same bargain for decades, most clearly in Laurent Bouzereau’s 1997 documentary The Making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. After the 1977 release hit, he went back to the studio about a year and a half later and asked to finish the picture the way he had intended. Columbia’s answer came with a price tag and a shot list.

After the film’s success, I went back to Columbia a year and a half later and said, ‘Now let me finish the film the way I had always intended to. I wanna recut certain scenes and I want to shoot more sequences.’ And then they said to me, ‘We’ll give you the money… if you show the inside of the mothership. Give us something we can hang a campaign on.’ And so I compromised and had Richard Dreyfuss walking inside the mothership.

Steven Spielberg, director, The Making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1997)

That sentence is the whole business model. The recut was not a gift to an auteur. It was a reissue contract. Columbia would pay for new photography if the new photography could sell a return visit.

He took the money. Richard Dreyfuss, as Roy Neary, walked up a ramp and into a set that concept artist Ron Cobb helped imagine as a kind of cathedral hangar, with small craft docking in a vast lit chamber. Spielberg later said he never should have done it, “because that should have always been kept a mystery, the inside of that ship.”

November Was Nonnegotiable for a Shaky Studio

The first version of the film was already a rush job. Spielberg wanted six more months and a summer 1978 opening. Columbia told him the company was on the line and the picture had to make November. He has recalled the instruction in that same 1997 interview: they kept insisting he had to make Christmas, then November, because the whole company was at stake.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind premiered in New York on November 16, 1977, then took a national opening on December 14, 1977. Box Office Mojo logs an original domestic haul of $116,395,460 and a lifetime worldwide gross of $306,889,114 against a $20 million budget. International ticket sales in that tally are $171,700,000.

By April 3, 1978, the film had nine Academy Award nominations and two wins, including the cinematography Oscar for Vilmos Zsigmond and a Special Achievement Award for Frank E. Warner’s sound-effects editing. Spielberg was nominated for directing. Melinda Dillon was nominated for supporting actress. This was not a salvage job on a flop. Columbia was squeezing a second campaign out of a hit that had already paid the bills.

He has said the original run “rescued Columbia from bankruptcy.” That is why the 1979 check mattered. A studio that had just been pulled back from the edge was not about to fund extra shooting as a favor. It wanted a poster, a trailer, and a reason for people who had already seen Roy smash his mashed potatoes to buy another ticket.

What the 1980 Recut Added and Cut

Columbia’s $1.5 million did not buy a longer movie. Spielberg added about seven minutes of new and previously unused footage and cut or shortened about ten minutes of the 1977 cut. The Special Edition runs 132 minutes, three minutes shorter than the original 135. It returned to U.S. theaters in August 1980. Box Office Mojo records $15,693,175 for that reissue, about ten times the recut budget and close to the original production cost all over again.

THE THREE OFFICIAL CUTS

The 1998 cut is the longest, two minutes past the 1977 theatrical and five past the Special Edition. Spielberg built it from the first release plus selected 1980 scenes, then dropped the campaign shot Columbia had required. Lifetime domestic ticket sales of $135,189,114 fold in the 1977 run, the 1980 reissue, and later repertory dates, including $3,100,479 from a 2017 return.

Ray Morton’s making-of study of the Special Editions walks through that second shoot as its own production, not a trim pass. New photography had to give exhibitors something they could advertise. The Gobi Desert gag and the ship’s interior were designed to be that something.

The Compromised Cut Owned Home Video

The theatrical gross was only half the stake. For years the Special Edition was the cut you could actually rent. If you grew up with Roy Neary on cassette, you grew up inside the mothership, because that was the version RCA/Columbia put on tape. The 1977 ending, which leaves the ship’s belly as light and sound, was not the default living-room experience.

WHAT THE $1.5 MILLION BOUGHT

• The interior: Dreyfuss walks into the mothership for a tour Columbia could put in ads.
• The Cotopaxi: Investigators find the missing freighter parked in the Gobi Desert, a new piece of spectacle up front.
• The family scenes: Extra beats of Roy’s household coming apart, including a darker spiral at home.
• The trims: About ten minutes of 1977 material gone, among them stretches the 1998 cut later restored, such as the Air Force press conference.

That mix is why some viewers still defend the 1980 film. They did not experience it as a studio insert. They experienced it as Close Encounters. Spielberg’s later regret does not erase the fact that Columbia’s version was, for a long stretch, the only official copy in circulation.

Disc collectors still argue the point in 2026, and the sharpest take is blunt: once you see the hangar, the last movement of John Williams’s score is explaining a room instead of an invitation. The people who now tell first-timers to skip the Special Edition are not being precious. They are protecting the one effect the 1977 ending still has, which is that you do not know what Roy sees.

Fox Later Scaled the Same Reissue Play

Columbia proved a finished hit could be sold again if you hung a campaign on a visible change. Seventeen years later, 20th Century Fox industrialized that lesson. Star Wars: Special Edition opened on January 31, 1997, to $35 million, then did about $138 million domestic as a reissue. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi followed in the same winter with their own “upgrades.”

George Lucas had the clout to call those changes his original intent. Columbia had already shown the sales pitch: call it a Special Edition, put the new images in the trailer, and treat the theatrical cut as a beta. The 1980 Close Encounters recut did not invent director’s cuts as a home-video extra. It invented the idea that a studio could charge admission for a revision and print the revision as the film.

Later theatrical and disc overhauls followed the same grammar, from Apocalypse Now Redux to the Star Wars prequels’ later tweaks to Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Each one asks the audience to accept that the version they paid for was incomplete. The party with skin in that game is rarely only the director. It is the company that needs a new SKU.

The 1998 Cut Puts the Mystery Back

Spielberg got the last word on May 12, 1998, when the Collector’s Edition reached home video. He kept the Cotopaxi and some of the family wreckage from 1980, restored pieces of 1977, and locked the mothership. Roy still walks into the light. The camera does not follow. That is the cut he has called definitive, 18 years after Columbia’s tour.

HOW THE FILM CHANGED HANDS

1. November 16, 1977: Original 135-minute cut premieres, rushed for Columbia’s calendar.
2. 1979: Studio funds a $1.5 million recut on the condition that the mothership open.
3. August 1980: Special Edition, 132 minutes, returns to theaters and later owns the cassette market.
4. May 12, 1998: Collector’s Edition, 137 minutes, drops the interior and becomes Spielberg’s preferred cut.

Current 4K packages still ship all three, which is the afterlife of the 1979 contract. The studio’s tour sits on the same shelf as the cut that refuses it. Spielberg, for his part, is still selling the skies. In 2026 he put UFO billboards in Los Angeles and New York, another campaign hung on a light in the clouds. The instinct Columbia trained in 1980 never left the business. He just stopped letting it inside the ship.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Does a Close Encounter of the Third Kind Mean?

Astronomer J. Allen Hynek coined the scale in his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. A close encounter of the third kind is a sighting close enough to include an animated occupant, a humanoid, robot, or apparent pilot, not just lights or a craft. Spielberg licensed the phrase, hired Hynek as a consultant, and gave him a brief on-screen cameo among the Devil’s Tower witnesses.

Which Cut of Close Encounters Is the Shortest?

The 1980 Special Edition is the shortest at 132 minutes, three minutes under the 1977 theatrical even though about seven minutes of new footage went in, because about ten minutes of the original were removed. The 1998 Collector’s Edition is the longest at 137 minutes.

Did Close Encounters of the Third Kind Win Oscars?

It took nine nominations and two wins at the 50th Academy Awards on April 3, 1978: Vilmos Zsigmond for cinematography and a Special Achievement Award for Frank E. Warner’s sound-effects editing. Spielberg lost directing to Woody Allen for Annie Hall. Melinda Dillon was nominated for supporting actress and did not win.

Can You Still Watch the Mothership Interior?

Yes. 4K sets issued in 2026 still include the Theatrical Version, the Special Edition, and the Director’s Cut, so the Columbia tour remains an extra even though Spielberg’s preferred 1998 blend omits it. If you play the Special Edition chapter, Roy’s walk-in is there; if you play the Collector’s Edition, it is not.

Which Version Does Steven Spielberg Prefer?

The 1998 Collector’s Edition, a re-edit of the 1977 film with selected 1980 additions and no mothership interior. He has said the inside of the ship should have stayed a mystery, and that 137-minute cut is the one he treats as finished.

The 1980 tour is still on the disc. So is the cut that leaves the door shut.